admiralteal @ admiralteal @kbin.social

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Joined

2 yr. ago

So it's queerbashing, then. Got it.

You literally know not one of my positions yet are comfortable calling me an extremist. You can go ahead and stop pretending to be on the moral high-ground because you clearly aren't.

I'm here telling you your positions are welcome and can be included among the dems. They already are the "reasonable party" you so desire. You remain totally mum on what the politics you hold are that lead to your ostracism -- I'll go ahead and assume it's something pretty fucking hateful based on that. Because the alternative is that you care so deeply about the label you picked for yourself that you don't care at all about what that label means to literally eveyone else. It's a stupid, stubborn, and arrogant stance that the Republican party doesn't know what they stand for as well as you, some guy.

The Republicans are the no-compromise party. Your "centrism" is unwelcome with them. Come into the light and maybe you can help make the world better. If not, understand that people like me will believe you when you tell them who you are.

No, it's definitionally half-baked.

My views aren't extreme or radical. They are principles. I believe in certain first principles and my understanding of the world flows from them. Principles such as the state having an imperative to become more effective and efficient over time, which defines my progressivism. Principles about the state having an obligation to not infringe in certain fundamental liberties held by all people, which define my liberalism. Principles like the state needing to exist to serve a just outcome for as many people as possible, which defines my socialism.

In some cases, there are tension between these principles. When that happens, you have to debate and investigate and come up with an answer about what is right and what is wrong. But being a "moderate" means you aren't committed to your principles. It is half-baked. It means abandoning that debate and instead taking a middle road. It means you only follow your principles sometimes. And people who only sometimes follow their principles are not respectable.

You're the one living in an alternate reality. The dems are the party of radical compromise. They're a party that has no choice but to only act with consensus because they have no power without it. That's why Biden is the current POTUS; he's the compromise king. Based on everything that you claim to believe in, the dems are your party. But you identify Republican. So either you're just plain wrong about what the parties are, or you have some secret terrible belief that is incompatible with the party of compromise. There is not one defensible belief a person can have which would get them ostracized from the dem caucus -- the only beliefs that would get you case out from that tent are ones of overt bigotry or total idiocy.

I mean, that IS moderate for a Republican. The more typical party view is Make America Handmaid's Tale.

If she weren't a degenerate buffoon, she wouldn't be campaigning as a Republican.

Anyone who still identifies themselves with the (R) in this day and age can be written off as an idiot and bigot..

I don't get the joke. Where are these alleged leftists who have any significant sway over the dems?

The only reason to identify yourself as a "centrist republican" over a dem in this day and age is because you hold a bunch of weird, conservative, bigoted views that you don't care to admit or because you're totally deluded about what these parties have stood for for the last few decades.

There's no platform in the modern republicans but MAGA and hate. It's been that way, one way or another, since at least Nixon. And while the dems have hardly held an uninterrupted tenure as being the camp for progressives, liberals, and practical socialists, there's no doubt they're the party of everyone who isn't fucking insane right now.

I don't respect your half-baked politics. You're identifying yourself as Republican on some weird-ass personal pride, as best I can tell, and you should stop.

Oh god forbid they investigate the source of this election tampering and, when it inevitably is discovered that a Republican was behind it, that Republican be punished in an appropriate way.

You made the decision entirely on your own that the other guy doesn't give a shit about the truth. But since he's clearly not a conservative, that's a bogus assumption -- non-conservatives care about the truth, he's just rightly confident that the GOP is actively trying to undermine democracy and is rightly saying that people who try to undefine the republic do not deserve its seats of power. That's why he's so sure an investigation will tie this to the perpetrators.

The Republicans you yearn for haven't existed since a conservative murdered Lincoln. Stop pining for a return to a better past that never really existed in the first place. Conservatism is the same toxic impulse as nostalgia.

Why is a private business inherently better than the government as an ISP, though?

Either way it has to follow all relevant local laws about how to behave. The ISPs will respond to law enforcement requests either way. But at least a public entity will also need to be accountable to the public and respond to things like FOIA, as opposed to a private entity which has all kinds of ways to resist transparency and is more accountable to the shareholders.

Either way it is a near natural monopoly because running redundant wires/fiber is a waste of resources. There won't be much consumer choice.

The idea that the government would be inherently inefficient is one that presumes a private entity that is highly insulated from market force wouldn't. Free markets create a lot of pressure to improve products, but there's no free market happening in a utility like an ISP. Even in the most competitive markets, that's still choosing one from maybe 4 providers that barely compete with each other at all. And you have to sign longterm contracts with all kinds of complex pricing to "test" the competition, and testing it requires pretty advanced knowledge beyond most users -- if you have no freedom to easily change your ISP, there's just not any competition.

If the sword is double-edged, one of those edges is safe enough for a renfair.

A "few bad actors" including the entire party leadership.

You say they "could turn around" as if they haven't been actively doing this for ages. The treaty is being broken by conservatives, and they do it proudly and with gusto. How long are the rest of reasonable people supposed to stand back and let the country be destroyed by these monsters?

What you want is for the non-conservatives to surrender. You want all the reasonable, sane people that want a better society to roll over and give up and let the ones who desire slavery and genocide back into power. This isn't the left versus the right -- this is the rising tide of fascism against everyone else. You are leaping forward to chasten the victims of the violence for their fantasy about some turnabout while not being clear in your condemnation of the aggressors shows a lack of moral fortitude.

A few bad apples indeed, because they have spoiled the bunch.

If you are trying to maintain privacy from the bad actors that most people should fear -- that is, advertisers and marketers --
VPNs are very effective because they increase the cost of that kind of datasurvillenace of you enough to make it not worth it. At least for now.

If you are trying to maintain privacy against state actors, especially to hide criminal activity, they will not be particularly effective. But are still better than the ISPs who likely don't even have a policy of vetting state requests before turning over info.

Literally illegal in much of the US. Rentseekers must be protected.

We shouldn't even need to "remove" qualified immunity. We do, but you we shouldn't. Qualified immunity already excludes violations of statutory/constitutional rights. It already shouldn't be protecting pretty much any incompetent cops. Showing it was a violation of training -- that is, that the officer was incompetent -- should be enough to re move the protection.

The original standard as applied to police required they be able to show they were acting in good faith in a situation where the law is not clear. For Christ's sake it was established by an Earl Warren decision -- from probably the ONLY time in US history the SCOTUS has mostly been a force that strengthened civil rights instead of deleting them -- and it somehow has become this bulwark of the police state over time.

Even now it is supposed to be a 2 part test: first, can the official show they believed in good faith they were behaving lawfully and second was the conduct objectively reasonable. Most police abuse shouldn't pass either pillar of that test.

It isn't even originally statutory. It came from the SCOTUS legislating from the bench.

The idea that qualified immunity should protect police is utterly absurd to begin with. Qualified immunity is what stops a bureaucrat for being sued for stamping approval on a zoning change according to the policies of his job. It's just a category mistake to apply it to 95% of police activities.

The insurance solution sounds good until you remember it's the taxpayer that foots the bill and a private industry that reaps the profit. The cost is basically external to the department so it is unlikely to seriously change their behaviors absent a separate and more complete cultural shift to one where the police are viewed as public servants instead of... well, police.

My memory idles on around 3341MiB with a browser and just a few basic daemons like Syncthing used in mint cinnamaon. 4GB is pretty tight unless you are willing to make some behavioural changes or use a less friendly distro. But 8GB is more than enough.

Different story trying to run VMs on my server, though.

Traffic violations is an almost perfect example of a place where people pin all the biggest problems on poor exercises of individual responsibility when really it's almost entirely and issue of road engineering and urban design.

We build streets that encourage bad behavior and then get mad when the bad behavior happens.

Even behaviors people consider quite aberrant like street racing can only happen because we build race tracks in cities and then try to pretend they're something else.

Or take drunk driving. Of course people are going to drive drunk when your entire society is structured around driving being the only way a reasonable person gets from point a to point b... This doesn't forgive the bad behavior, but taking a firm moral position here instead of listening to the explanation and making a change is not going to protect any lives.

In the first place, you can't fix bad driving with enforcement. You can only punish it after it already happened. Pretty much no one is going to stop driving badly because pretty much nobody intended to drive badly.

You do not fix road safety with an enforcement-based solution. All the money sent to police to try to keep the roads safe is money that could have actually been spent on engineering solutions to keep the road safe and instead is now pissed away into the wind.

It IS a cultural thing, but you're placing blame on bad actors when it's a systemic problem -- a systemic problem with the culture of US road engineering. That is, US road engineers do not have a robust culture of safety. The priority is and always has been speed and "level of service" (aka throughput) in the designs over safety or cost effectiveness or even pleasantness of the urban landscapes.

I'll never buy the idea that a wide set of diverse people across an entire continent are all just worse than the rest of people around the world. The fact that the problem is widespread is proof the issue is not bad actors.

The US does have more people who shouldn't be driving driving though, I'll agree with that much. But it isn't because they're reckless lunatics that don't care about other road users, and I'll never buy the covid arguments that people all went NUTS during covid and started mowing down pedestrians -- because no way that would've happened in JUST the US and nowhere else. It is, again, a systemic issue. The same one. Since driving is essential for most people to live their lives in the US, people who had no business driving are driving. Because of our INCREDIBLY terrible philosophy towards urban design and road constructions, we have pigeonholed ourselves into an expensive, unsafe urban landscape.

A lot of mass transit got downsized during covid, for example. That could've put more bad drivers on the roads -- but it isn't because they're monsters, it's because they have no choice.

Nah, we know this isn't the reason because in other countries that have better road design that actually takes psychology into mind for design speeds, they did not see the same uptick. Also, other countries are seeing gradual decreases in road deaths while the US continues to see increases.

You can also look at e.g., the dangerous by design reports and see very clearly WHERE the road fatalities are happening. During covid it was all over the map. Post covid, it is clearly skewing away from the blue cities.

It's a very clear natural experiment with an obvious conclusion: the US has fundamentally unsafe road engineering. We focus on speed over safety in our designs, which in low congestion works perfectly (i.e., makes roads fast and unsafe) and in nominal conditions achieves neither.

Load up all of AASHTO into rockets and shoot them into the sun.

Also saw significant increases in road fatalities.

Because it turns out the main thing keeping many of our roads safe was... congestion. When operated at true designed speeds, the roads kill people.

Trains are not the solution to every problem.

Light rail intercity transportation is a good option, but it only makes sense on well-traveled routes. And while it is true that the trains induce significant demand -- that is, the route they are on will BECOME well-traveled because the train access is so valuable that people want to be near it -- this is only solving a few very narrow commute problems.

Trains ARE the solution to major commuter congestion, though, and for many well-developed metros are probably the only path to reducing congestion since you cannot just continue to add more roads.

Your autonomous shuttle idea might make sense for less-traveled routes, but pavement is incredibly expensive to maintain compared to rail and vehicles that have to carry around their power source around are seriously inefficient compared to a pantograph, not to even get in to rolling resistance. Busses are useful as a start, but in response to growth they should continue evolving sensibly -- car to bus to trolly bus to tram to fully-separated light rail is a logical progression as a city grows, but a city that knows it is growing fast is often wise to skip steps to save longterm cost.

The actual full solution to the issue of cars is the same one it has been for all 10,000 years of the human urban experiment (less the last 60ish) -- build towns that are primarily navigable on your own power. Don't create robust social policies that cut off infill and multifamily residence. Don't push all business and work sites to some far-flung corner compared to where people life. Don't subsidize a fake-rural lifestyle in islands that cannot sustain themselves at the expense of the poor people living in old-development neighborhoods. Don't build more roads that you can afford to maintain and don't permit road geometries you know are going to kill people -- zero routine deaths is the only acceptable number.

A city you can get around under your own power is less expensive to maintain and more pleasant to live in for most people.

Not to even get into the relative safety (or lack thereof for cars & roads).

Yep, and the technology to operate that fleet is only 5 years away. Just like it has been for the last 15.

Anything to make communities think it is safe to refuse to invest in any other transportation mode.

I found out one of my 22-y-o coworkers, with no accident history or the like, pays as much quarterly as I do annually for car insurance.

It's just nuts. Used vehicle prices are through the roof in no small part because new vehicles are now ABSURDLY big and expensive.

AAA is now rating the cost of a new car to be something like $0.50-$1 per mile to operate. Or an average of $12k per year. When you carefully do the math, a lot of people are finding that the rideshares aren't much more expensive -- plus now they don't need to deal with the non-monetary costs of car ownership (maintenance, parking, fear of accident/theft, etc). And you can get blackout drunk to try and tune out the chaos of a dying planet and still be able to get home.

Not to mention car accidents are still, last I checked, the main killer of young people.